Vander opened an envelope and removed two squares of filter paper that were stained with dried, diluted blood. Then he added mixture A to B and told Wesley to hit the lights. A couple of quick sprays, and a bluish white neon glow appeared on the coffee table. It began to fade almost as quickly as it had appeared.

“Here,” Vander said to me.

I felt the spray bottle touch my arm, and took hold of it. A tiny red light went on as Vander depressed the power button on the video camera; then the night vision lamp burned white and looked wherever he did like a luminescent eye.

“Where are you?”

Vander’s voice sounded to my left.

“I’m in the center of the room. I can feel the edge of the coffee table against my leg,” I said, as if we were children playing in the dark.

“I’m way the hell out of the way.”

Wesley’s voice carried from the direction of the dining room.

Vander’s white light slowly moved toward me. I reached out and touched his shoulder. “Ready?”

“I’m recording. Start and just keep going until I tell you to stop.”

I began spraying the floor around us, my finger non-stop on the trigger as a mist floated over me and shapes and geometrical configurations materialized around my feet. For an instant, it was like speeding through the dark over the illuminated grid of a city far below. Old blood trapped in the crevices of the parquet emitted a bluewhite glow. I sprayed and sprayed, without having any real sense of where I was in relation to anything else, and saw footprints all over the room. I bumped against the ficus tree and dim white streaks appeared on the planter that held it. To my right smeared handprints flashed on the wall.

“Lights,” Vander said.

Wesley turned on the overhead light and Vander mounted a thirty-five- millimeter camera on a tripod to keep it still. The only light available would be the fluorescence of the luminol, and the film would need a long exposure time to capture it. I retrieved a full bottle of luminol and, when the lights were out again, resumed spraying the smeared handprints on the wall while the camera captured the eerie images on film. Then we moved on. Lazy, wide swipes appeared on paneling and parquet, and the stitching on the leather couch was a neon hatch line incompletely tracing the square shapes of the cushions.

“Can you lift them out of the way?” ander asked.